First off, did you know you could repair cannons in the Isle of Conquest now? I think this is new. I don’t know if this is something only Engineers can do, but it’s kinda cool to be able to revive cannons.

Repairing cannons is about the only good thing I can say about the Isle of Conquest right now. It’s broken in so many ways that puts every other time I’ve said it’s broken to shame. This isn’t about having the terrain favor one side or another. Oh, I long for those days now!

No, instead we have:

Trying to get to the Airship from the Hangar kills you instantly, sending you 8 miles off the coast of the Isle to drown in deep water.

Huge pink blocks of doom that appear when the Alliance breaches the gates of the Horde Keep.

Think I’m kidding about the Big Pink Blocks of Doom? Vikt (from Of the Horde) sent me this great screenshot:

… which kinda demonstrates the futility of Alliance breaking down the gate.

Let’s look at what these bugs do to each side’s strategy. For Alliance:

Avoid the Hangar, it’s a death trap. So no parachuting into the keep.

The Workshops are mostly useless to you on Offense, since the siege can’t break through the pink blocks once the gates are down.

Take the Docks, ignore the Glaives, and use Catapults to get inside the keep.

For the Horde:

Avoid the Hangar.

Take the Workshops, since the Alliance aren’t going to contest it anyways (as it’s useless to them).

Let the Alliance take the Docks, then station a defensive force to kill the Catapults just around the bend in the road, where they’ll be strung out and poorly defended.

Used the vehicles from the Workshop to take the keep and win.

As a Horde player, you absolutely want to be queuing for Isle of Conquest right now. You are going to win. Seriously, you are going to win. The odds are stacked so high right now in the Horde’s favor, you’d be dumb not to queue for this one and rack up some wins.

As an Alliance player, you’re going to get IoC in your random queue more often than you like precisely because the Horde are queuing for it. And that means you’re going to lose. (Sorry about that, I’m just keeping it real, yo.) The best way to try to win is to send a small force to the Docks, with a larger force to contest the Workshops. I have yet to see this work, but it seems like the only viable strategy is to disrupt the Horde assault.

The important thing to keep, if Isle of Conquest comes up as your random BG, is your sense of humor. This battleground has BIG PINK BLOCKS that completely negate whatever skill advantages your side might have (or lack). This BG is broken.

Don’t sweat it. Laugh, and move on.

P.S. The scoreboards are broken, too:

Although, I suppose it’s possible that those two REALLY know how to heal…

14 responses to “The Isle of Conquest is REALLY Broken”

After having recently noticed the LoS issue of turrets on the corners still being an issue I have come to realise that blizzard do not give a damn about fair pvp.
I have repeatedly reported abuse both of the wintergrasp fortress ring in the top of the room, and for the gaining of access to the top of the ironforge armory.
Both I regularly saw abused by the same players so reporting is achieving nothing.
I was even told on the forums that a “fix” for the WG ring exploit was incoming, but considering that abuse has been present as far as I know since the release of the expansion I do not hold out much hope, in fact rather believing that to be utter rubbish.
They will happily screw over exploration, which while being borderline exploitative or blatently so in some cases, it is in many cases offering no advantage or option of abuse.
These cases most certainly are though, and with no obvious intent to fix them, or even take any proper action against those who abuse them I just have to question where the priorities of blizzard lie, for they are not certainly in producing a quality game anymore.

I havent played WOW for over one year now but I clearly recall I’ve always been able to repair canons on Isle of Conquest. And I’m not an engineer. That made me Google it up and found that, (since at least 3.1.3) you’ve been able to repair the cannons. And this makes me wonder, what were you up to in Isle of Conquest if you weren’t manning those cannon’s, hein?! :)

Eh, it’s pretty simple – I’m rarely in a cannon. I’m down either on the wall by the weak Alliance gate dotting and fearing people, or I’m out there trying to pick off support personnel while dotting up the vehicles. Sitting in a cannon gets boring after about 2 minutes. :-)

Like I said, I don’t spend a lot of time in the cannons. I abuse Demonic Circle and that low wall on the west side between the tower and gate to go out, dot stuff up, and get out before the Horde gets me. The attacks are always to that side, out of LOS for sustained cannon fire.

I think you’re right, that should work – I’ve just never saw it come close. I played a few IoCs this weekend and saw the reinforcements drop, but then the Horde would win by boss kill. I figured it was because the Horde weren’t focusing on any other targets, so the Alliance enjoy a temporary advantage – and then boom.

Well I play Horde, so I can’t say I know how you could get over the crazy disadvantage the allies have here. But you could try wipping the Horde in your boss’s room?

Potentially, this could function like AV, where your 40 + the boss = you winning most of the time. In this way you could turtle/stall out the Horde, and beat them in reinforcements, as mentioned above.

I don’t play alliance, like I said, so no way to test it. And it would certainly be lonnggg. But pontentially worth a shot? Just play to get reinforcements down till your gate drops, then wipe them at the boss room.